Digital product innovation within four classes of innovation networks

TLDR

Digitization of organizational processes and products creates new challenges for product innovation and opens fresh avenues for information systems research, while each innovation network involves distinct cognitive and social translations of knowledge. The study examines how pervasive digitization reshapes knowledge creation and sharing in innovation networks, distinguishes four emerging digital‑supported network types, and highlights implications for future research, especially the rise of anarchic networks driven by digital convergence. Advances in digital technologies enhance network connectivity by lowering communication costs and expanding reach, accelerate digital convergence to increase knowledge heterogeneity, and digital infrastructures provide representational flexibility, semantic coherence, traceability, brokering, and linguistic calibration to support each network type. These dynamics stretch existing networks by redistributing control and heightening the need for coordinated knowledge across time and space, and they reveal that anarchic networks emerge from full digital convergence, prompting a critical reassessment of modularization’s role in innovation.

Abstract

Abstract The increased digitization of organizational processes and products poses new challenges for understanding product innovation. It also opens new horizons for information systems research. We analyse how ongoing pervasive digitization of product innovation reshapes knowledge creation and sharing in innovation networks. We argue that advances in digital technologies (1) increase innovation network connectivity by reducing communication costs and increasing its reach and scope and (2) increase the speed and scope of digital convergence, which increases network knowledge heterogeneity and need for integration. These developments, in turn, stretch existing innovation networks by redistributing control and increasing the demand for knowledge coordination across time and space presenting novel challenges for knowledge creation, assimilation and integration. Based on this foundation, we distinguish four types of emerging innovation networks supported by digitalization: (1) project innovation networks; (2) clan innovation networks; (3) federated innovation networks; and (4) anarchic innovation networks. Each network involves different cognitive and social translations – or ways of identifying, sharing and assimilating knowledge. We describe the role of five novel properties of digital infrastructures in supporting each type of innovation network: representational flexibility, semantic coherence, temporal and spatial traceability, knowledge brokering and linguistic calibration. We identify several implications for future innovation research. In particular, we focus on the emergence of anarchic network forms that follow full‐fledged digital convergence founded on richer innovation ontologies and epistemologies calling to critically re‐examine the nature and impact of modularization for innovation.